Why Powershell is a big dealOne of the great benefits of the computing age is the amount of mind-numbing labor that digital machines allow us to avoid doing. The surprise, however, is just how rarely people are automating these tasks. Worse, even among computing admins, there’s a tendency to use the wrong tool for the right job when it comes to automating tasks. It may seem easier to fiddle with the task scheduler on a single machine, but once you scale up much at all the weapon of choice quickly becomes Powershell.

What is Powershell?

To say that Powershell is an automation tool would be a gross understatement of its capabilities. Powershell is the most power automation tool available to most Windows users. It’s built on top of the .NET framework, and that means it has access to everything imaginable in a system. More important, it can be quickly added to multiple systems throughout a network, allowing to quickly access cmdlets on a whole array of units quickly. If you need to shut down an entire pack of servers, Powershell allows you to do that in the most efficient manner possible.

Powershell does everything that you’d expect from a scripting tool, and if scripting is all you need, it will do that well enough. Where Powershell really goes crazy is its ability to access to functions that are even exposed through the graphical interface. In this regard, it provides a command-line level of functionality to things that we’d traditionally think of as inherently graphical components that shouldn’t be accessible through a CLI.

History

Powershell was introduced by Microsoft to users of Windows XP, Vista and Server 2003 in 2006. It was also available as an optional component to users of Server 2008. The second generation of Powershell is fully integrated into Windows 7 and all later operating systems. Powershell 2.0 was the big leap forward, as it include the most total features and the greatest jump in capability. Powershell Foreach is currently in version 5.0, and it has been adapted with snap-ins and hosts to increase interoperability with non-Windows systems. There is also an open source version of Powershell called Pash that’s available for use on Linux systems that run the Mono framework.

The Basics

Powershell is designed to access four basic types of programs. Its standard component is the cmdlet, a small service that allows you to embed simple functions quickly and interact with them through Powershell. There are also Powershell scripts, which work like bash scripts in Unix or like much more powerful versions of batch files in Windows. Powershell also has its own range of built-in functions that allow it to handle simple tasks without additional scripting or coding work. It also permits you access to standalone executables, a function you can easily see being powerful.

Cmdlets are actually highly specialize .NET classes. They use a basic child-parent structure that most programmers will instantly recognize. This makes accessing information further downstream very easy, and it also allows anyone skilled in using Powershell to quickly transfer information between the cmdlets and the main interface.

You can also install a pipeline between cmdlets. If you’ve ever used an OS like Linux, you’ll appreciate just how powerful this functionality is. Piping allows you to quickly stack several cmdlets together into a single executable command. This

means that you can rapidly pass output up the chain, telling each command further up the line what the ones below it already know.

Powershell also has hosting features built in. For example, Microsoft Exchange uses Powershell to pipe data from other sources into its GUI. Hosts can also pass piped data further up the chain. If you would like to learn more about Powershell I would suggest checking out any high quality Powershell tutorial.

Conclusion

Powershell makes a whole range of tasks much easier, from deployment to everyday maintenance. It offers an unprecedented level of access to underlying commands and information in almost any application that operates on top of the .NET framework. It is in many ways the ultimate power user’s tool for the Windows operating system.